The strike zone is easy to define, until it comes to an umpire putting it into practice
d12 • VISUALIZING FOUR UMPIRES, four STRIKE ZONES

Marlins right-hander Livan Hernandez threw 143 pitches one October evening in 1997, but it was a collection of 37 that have since lived on in infamy. Those were the called strikes. Those were the throws that left Atlanta hitters fuming and Atlanta fans furious.

As it turns out, there were two broken records that night. One was literal, with Hernandez setting the NLCS strikeout mark by fanning 15 Braves en route to Florida’s first pennant. The other was figurative, with home-plate umpire Eric Gregg ringing up batters over and over and over again on pitches that looked at least three inches off the outside corner.

Hernandez, a rookie at the time, went on to win series MVP, but he was hardly the most potent force in that pivotal Game 5. Nope, that honor went to the strike zone — a cosmic entity that has forever been baseball’s snowflake. No two are exactly like.

Baseball America voted Gregg’s officiating as the Majors’ third-worst umpiring performance during the last quarter of the 20th century. But in reality, his may have simply been the zone that got caught. For something that is supposed to be as objective as the solution to a math problem, the strike zone continues to endure with the subjectivity of an inkblot — shrinking, expanding, shifting, deceiving … and affecting outcomes with double-agent stealth.

“The strike zone is that area over home plate, the upper limit of which is a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants, and the lower level is a line at the hollow beneath the kneecap. The strike zone shall be determined from the batter’s stance as the batter is prepared to swing at a pitched ball.”

— Rule 2.00 of the MLB Rulebook.

There is the definition. There is the characterization of a strike, which may very well be the most significant rule in team sports. If hitting a baseball really is the most difficult feat in athletics, then the area determining when a batter must swing should be categorically identified.

Theoretically, given what’s at stake in this game of inches, there should be no disputes, discrepancies or disagreements whatsoever when it comes to the strike zone. In reality, it may be the most pored over rectangle this side of Pythagoras.

College professors have written papers on it. Renowned sabermatrician Dan Brooks has concocted algorithms on the edges of the plate alone. Former Baseball Prospectus writer Mike Fast — now an analyst with the Astros — has penned four 2,000-plus-word articles on the topic.

It may seem excessive, but miners wouldn’t keep digging if they weren’t striking gold.

Take, for instance, Hardball Times blogger Josh Weinstock’s post from last year, which examined the strike zone for the 74 Major League umpires who saw at least 3,000 pitches in 2011. Weinstock found that the smallest zone (Tim Tschida) and the largest zone (Doug Eddings) ranged from 2.85 to 3.65 square feet. Even Padres manager Bud Black, who for the most part dismissed strike-zone interpretations as a major influence on the game, confessed “that’s significant.”

But is it actually? Can the average ump-heckling fan feel his boos are justified?

Well, the stat geeks will tell you that the varying zones have considerable impacts on advanced sabermetrics such as Fielding Independent Pitching (considered the purest measure of a pitcher’s performance) and kwERA (earned run average based solely on walks and strikeouts). And if you type that into Google Translator real quick, click Stat Geek to English, it’ll tell you that … the strike zone is, in fact, influencing the game.

For a more digestible look at the zone’s effect on run-production, let’s juxtapose Weinstock’s article with a chart put together by University of Florida professor Brian Mills, who tabulated the average number of runs per game 75 plate umpires saw from 2007-2010.

Ready? The umpires with the five smallest strike zones all yielded more runs per game than the mean, while three of them (Tschida, Tim McClelland and Chad Fairchild) were among the top eight in runs allowed. Conversely, the umps with the five largest strike zones all saw fewer runs per game than the mean, with three (Eddings, Bill Miller and Ron Kulpa) landing in the bottom 14. McClelland’s RPG was 9.82 compared to Eddings’ 8.56.

Does this prove beyond all reasonable doubt than the man behind the catcher is having a significant impact on results? No. But it seems to have a pretty good shot at the civil trial.

“We are asking humans to perform a discriminatory task, where a ball moving imperceptibly fast is being judged by a person trying to be perceptive,” said the aforementioned Dan Brooks, also a psychology professor. “But it’s really interesting to look at the way in which umpires judge the strike zone, and how it differs from person to person.”

But that cosmic entity that is the strike zone reacts to more than just an umpire. The count, the pitcher’s target, the type of pitch, the side of the plate the batter swings from, and a slew of other circumstances can trigger its mutation.

Why is that, though? And … is this necessarily a bad thing?

Oh, and enough with the nerds. What do the players themselves think?

n n n

“Jesus. Where’s the outside corner? I don’t know. I don’t have an answer for that.”

— Mariners All-Star pitcher Felix Hernandez, reacting to a graphic illustrating how his strikes are called in comparison to Livan Hernandez’s.

Have to be smart when approaching ballplayers on this subject, because there are certain buzzwords that will put their answers on autopilot and “umpire” is one of them. You could literally say to a left fielder “there’s an umpire wanted on three counts of GTA,” and he will respond “umpires have a really tough job and are the best in the world at what they do.”

But once players realize that they are not being asked to criticize but simply relay their observations, the experiences they share often match up with academic findings to a tee.

Padres third baseman Chase Headley, for example, has emerged as one of the finest switch-hitters in baseball. However, he has noticed one incessantly irksome consequence of batting left-handed, and that’s the strike zone’s inclination to drift a couple inches off the outside corner.

“I’ve said it a lot. It seems like when you’re hitting-right handed facing a left-handed pitcher, the edge of the plate away is usually the edge of the strike zone, whereas when you’re hitting left-handed and get a pitch away from you, it’s a soft zone up there — they get a little bit off the plate,” Headley said. “I don’t know why that is, but it’s definitely noticeable.”

Chase isn’t the first to discern this.

Mike Fast, the blogger-turned-Astros-employee, discovered that the average pitch to a left-handed batter is 2.4 inches farther off the plate than it is to a righty. This correlates beautifully with baseball analyst John Walsh’s finding that the average strike zone for a lefty is 2.3 inches farther away than his right-handed counterpart.

But why is that? Blatant discrimination? Not quite. The more likely explanation for the migrating zone is that catchers tend to set up off the plate when lefties are at bat.

Matt Nokes, the Patrick Henry High grad who spent 11 seasons as a big-league catcher, once told Baseball Digest that “predictability is the key to getting borderline calls. If the pitcher is consistent, the umpire knows where to be looking.”

In other words, if a pitcher hits his target, he is likely to get a strike called even if it’s slightly outside of the zone. On the other hand, if he misses his target but the pitch still crosses the plate, the umpire will call a ball more times than not.

This may help explain that infamous Marlins-Braves game 16 years ago — not to mention Felix Hernandez’s bewilderment.

Livan Hernandez, you see, aims toward the edge or even slightly off the edge of the plate. Felix, meanwhile, aims more toward the center. Blogger Jesse Douglas-Mathewson tracked pitches for both hurlers in 2010 and found that — particularly against right-handed batters — Livan got dozens of strike calls for pitches an inch or so off the outside corner while Felix got virtually none.

In essence, because of his approach, Livan Hernandez has a wider zone nearly every time he takes the mound.

This isn’t exclusive to Livan or even pitchers who try to paint the outside corner. Retired knuckleballer Tim Wakefield had a significantly higher zone than anyone in baseball, presumably because of the ball’s one-of-a-kind flight path.

The conclusion, then, would seem to be that expanding the zone has everything to do with where a pitcher tends to throw. And while that’s true to a certain extent — who he is throwing to may be just as significant.

Baker doesn’t like the term “framing.” He prefers “receiving.” But regardless of the semantics, a great catcher does possess the ability to manipulate the strike zone like a Vegas illusionist.

Brewers left fielder Ryan Braun, the 2011 National League MVP, said that Cardinals catcher Yadier Molina makes so many balls look like strikes that Braun often feels compelled to yell “come on man, I got no chance!” Meanwhile, Angels outfielder Mike Trout contends that Rays catcher Jose Molina is the game’s best at converting balls to strikes with his magic wand of a mitt.

Turns out this might be true.

There have been studies — although some of the data, by even the investigators’ accounts, seems too astonishing to be true — that the best strike-receiver may be saving more than two runs per 150 pitches than the worst. In fact, using Pitch/fx data (the pitch tracker you see on TV), analyst Mike Fast tracked catcher receiving over a period of four years and found that Jose Molina was more adept at causing the umpire to call balls strikes than anybody in baseball. His younger brother, Yadier, was fifth — and according to Fast, the siblings combined to save 110 runs over a four-year period using this skill alone.

How they did it? Well, one investigation compared Jose Molina to that of former Yankees’ catcher Jorge Posada — whose poor receiving technique was supposedly allowing runs — and noted that Molina’s mechanics were calm and quiet while Posada was “jumping, bouncing, lunging and swiping.”

Baker once said that he took more pride going 0 for 4 in a shutout than he did going 4 for 4 in a loss. Have to wonder if Posada felt the same way.

There is a litany of other quirks demonstrating how the strike zone simply cannot be tamed. When Braves catcher Brian McCann was at bat from 2007-2011, his zone varied by as much as a foot on top and half a foot at the bottom. Sabermatrician Dan Brooks found that fastballs are typically called differently than offspeed pitches. And according to Brian Mills, the Florida professor, the zone on a 3-0 count is nearly 15 baseballs larger than it is when it’s 0-2.

So what do players take from this? In the post-Moneyball era, where even the most diminutive of data are devoured ravenously, are teams scouting umps as intensely as opponents?

“In terms of studying it? Not really,” said Giants reliever Steve Edlefsen. “Maybe not as much as we should.”

Then again, Major League Baseball would say that there is not much to study. Not much to study at all.

n n n

“Over the last 10 years, the strike zone has been as consistent as it’s ever been. With our technology, if an umpire misses a pitch, he sticks out like a sore thumb.”

— Randy Marsh, Director of Major League Umpires

So far we’ve learned that the strike zone is subject to both idiosyncrasies and interpretations — but are they truly as dramatic as some of the research implies? Case in point: Weinstock’s study may have revealed that umpires’ strike zones range from 2.85 to 3.65 square feet, but that report also indicated that about 70 percent of the zones were between 3.1 and 3.4 square feet. Not a monumental difference.

Additionally, while Mills’ chart displayed how, over a three-year period, the average number of runs per game umpires saw differed by as many as 2.26 runs, 38 of the 75 umps analyzed were within a half a run of each other.

Keep in mind also that umpires are under constant scrutiny from the commissioner’s office, and can hardly go rogue and ignore marching orders — especially given the technology available to Major League Baseball, which Marsh insists is more advanced than anything on television or at a researcher’s disposal.

Still, while there is no way an umpire can make up his own rules and not be noticed, and while Marsh asserts that everyone is held to the loftiest standard, there hasn’t been an ump demoted to the minors in seven years.

Plus, even if the differences in officiating were minuscule, wouldn’t it be worth one’s while to learn whatever he could? The data says absolutely.

The players? Well … some aren’t quite there yet.

n n n

“I always trusted my knowledge of the strike zone. I suspect that if you start talking to players around the league, the guys who have success aren’t worried about the umpire. They’re going to trust their own ability.”

— Eight-time National League batting champion Tony Gwynn

Gwynn was particularly curious when this story was running because he wanted his players at San Diego State to see that the game’s elite don’t concern themselves with umpires. And to a large extent he’s right.

Despite Headley’s observation about left-handed hitters having a wider zone, he said that the second he starts factoring in officiating is when he’ll fall out of his rhythm. Trout seconded that.

Clayton Kershaw, the 2011 National League Cy Young winner, added that while he is aware of who is calling the game, he’ll never change his approach, while Giants closer Sergio Romo said succinctly “I just try to hit the mitt.”

But just because they aren’t taking into account the potential strike-zone variation, does that mean they shouldn’t be? In this day and age, when players and executives are on perpetual scavenger hunts for hidden advantages, couldn’t the umpires be the next step in the process?

Take left-handed batter Joey Votto, for example. The Reds first baseman hit .337 last year and is at .312 this year. But if you look at his “hot zones,” which break down how a hitter performs based on the pitch location, you’ll see that Votto struggles mightily with pitches just off the outside boundary of the strike zone and just under the lower boundary.

So if the umpire is Doug Eddings, whose strike zone gravitates toward the outside with lefties in the batter’s box, why on earth wouldn’t a pitcher work that corner? And if the ump is Ted Barrett, who is not only generous with outside pitches but low ones as well — what’s stopping a pitcher from exploiting all of Votto’s weak spots?

If you’re Twins catcher Joe Mauer, who hits .300 or better with pitches at the top of the zone, you want an ump who calls the high strike. If you’re reigning AL MVP Miguel Cabrera, who hits .250 or worse with those same pitches, you don’t. And if you’re a die-hard fan of the rulebook, your umpire is Tim McClelland, who has one of the more symmetrical zones in all the game.

But the strike zone’s influence may apply to more than just individuals.

The Yankees, who led all of baseball last year with 245 home runs, would surely desire an umpire such as Larry Poncino, whose airtight zone forces pitchers to sail it over the launching pad of a plate. The Dodgers, whose top three home-run hitters this season are all left-handed, would do anything to avoid Ron Kulpa, who tends to give pitchers the outside corner against lefties.

And if you’re a team with pinpoint pitching like the Braves of the 1990s, you fancy as liberal an ump as you can find. Tom Glavine and Greg Maddux were famous for expanding the zone throughout the game. Perhaps Gregg was simply restoring the universe’s equilibrium when he gave Livan Hernandez all those called strikes in the NLCS.

Given how hitting is rooted in instinct, knowledge of an umpire favors pitchers more so than batters. But for a scientific hitter like Votto, who devours videotape, pitching reports and any other shred of data, surely he can incorporate the umpire into his preparation.

The consensus among most players is that, when it comes to balls and strikes, consistency is key. But there are others such as Baker or Giants hurler Jeremy Affeldt who enjoy the forever fluctuating zone — viewing it as an opportunity for brain to one-up brawn.

“I think it adds gamesmanship and I don’t want to see that go away,” Baker said. “It’s good to have a little bit of gray area. When you know the umpires, it gives an edge to the guys who have been around.”

In no other sport is a rule this significant also this arbitrary. On a given night, it could be the difference between a slugger getting his pitch or going down looking, and in a given series, it could determine the World Series trophy’s next home.

But regardless of the league-wide sentiment, and regardless of MLB’s attempt to regulate it, baseball’s snowflake refuses to conform. Technically, the strike zone is a box — but it’s impossible to put in one.